Tag Archives: seo

Most of the times website owners forget doing some basic keywords research, whether we are talking about finding good keywords for PPC campaigns or even for organic optimisation. Google, as always, has yet another great tool for helping us in this matter called Google Insight Search. Google Insight Search reveals the search trends based on several criteria, when “asked” about different keywords or keyphrases.

This service is just a fantastic free one for companies trying to optimise and promote popular keywords related to their specific niche topic and also see which ones are on a “going up” or “going down” trend. What makes Google Insight Search truly an outstanding tool is the fact it reveals keywords trends based on the course of several years, thus getting a nice picture of whether it worth promoting or not a certain industry keyword.

This tool also helps you compare search volumes patterns based on regions, period of time and more other. Using it is a very easy task: just enter a search term you are trying to see whether it worth or not, choose your country and hit enter.
Suppose you do a search for the phrase “seo company” in UK, in the last years in England. Note that in the last month the sentence suffered a decline in terms of searching but also there are some relevant keywords that can be used instead of that. Moreover, the tool shows you that London is a great city to target related to that keyword while most searches are performed on that location.

Whether you are just starting a new campaign or working on a previous one, it might be a good start to use this tool in your SEO campaign and step-up with the right foot in website optimisation.

Google announced that will discontinue PageRank in the future, action that brought a wave of concerns among the “webmasters” having only one concern: “What PR will I have on the next update? ” What is your PR? ” and ” Link costs $50 because it is PR5”…

On the other hand, it isn’t a certain thing whether Google will drop the PR when it comes to some search engine’s internal calculations or not but it seems that we will not know these numbers anymore, which is definitely a good thing. There are two kinds of people: those who run after PageRank and those who simply ignore it.

In the first category we will find mostly webmasters who have created sites for selling links only. As you know, Google does not recommend buying links and it seems that this change has something to do with link-selling market. Moreover, in this category there are some SEO guys who understand that a bigger PR can be translated with higher rankings/conversion, which is utterly wrong.

The second category is related to those folks that simply ignore the PR and for these ones the basic rules will remain unchanged (of course, in this category you can find both SEO services firms and customers that they did not care about PR from the first place). And the basic rules are definitely as follow (in regarding to link building, of course)

But how will link building be affected by this change? Because let’s face it, it will take place sooner or later. The single link builders affected will be those that were “thinking in terms of PR”, however instead of searching for PR when trying to build links they will be more concerned on how related the website is, anchors text distribution, editorial/footer links differences and so on. So in the end it can only lead to “SEO evolving”.

This is a debate that seems to never end in the SEO industry, more precisely when it comes to link building. There are two types of link builders with different thoughts:

1. Quality links count more

Quality link are described as those of great value, coming from high PageRank websites, niche-related with less than let’s say 10 outbound links, featuring unique content and so on. These are the high-hanging fruits that are supposed to make a difference and indeed, quality links are most of the times the best ones a website could acquire, even if it lasts lot of time until getting some of those.

2. Quantity of links counts more

These are the usual blog comments, forums links, directories links, guestbook links and so on. The difference between the ones above and these is the fact that these come from high-spammed channels, are located in bad neighborhoods, have maybe thousands of outbound links on page, basically all the opposite to a quality link.

You might say that the answer is simple: quality links count more. But the question that comes is: are quality links easier to be obtained than quantity links? Again, you might say of course, due to the fact that quantity links require much work.
On the other hand, it would not be the first time we see websites ranking quite high in search engine results and when checking their backlinks we notice that only bad links are pointing to their websites, in high numbers. The answers for those sometimes huge numbers are, simple said:

Of course, those are not the single tools that automate link building however they are the most representative ones ever created. Getting back to our initial discussion, it seems that indeed, bad links in quantity can also help in website ranking but only when used with caution and without leaving any footprints. But in the end, one quality link could literally weight as much as 10,000 spam links so the decision on how to approach one of these strategies will only depend to the link builder.

When we are talking about link building strategies, one thing is sure : nobody really knows how Google ranks different sites and with the daily algorithm changes it is almost impossible to find out all its ranking factors. However, there are some factors that anyone should be aware of, and one of the most important factors is how your link building profile looks.

Before digging deeper into this subject, we should remind you that before all, it is a demonstrated fact that quality counts more than quantity, whether we are referring to creating content or building links for a website. With the algorithm changing each day, nowadays we cannot know for sure whether link numbers matter most or content, social media presence etc, but let’s see some points related to link profile.

1. Nofollow – dofollow ratio

Most people concentrate on getting only dofollow links, but does this look natural in Google bots’ eyes ? A website gathering links from different channels will definitely have nofollow as well so be prepared to take this into account when starting your link building strategy.

2. Valuable VS non-valuable links

Now an again, a natural link profile should definitely have in « portfolio » links from low blogs as well ; a link profile with let’s say 90% dofollow links from homepages will definitely pull the triggers and raise the red flag.

3. Anchor text diversity

Yes, you try to rank for a competitive keyword, however building links only with that anchor text is unusual. Add to your links portfolio long-tail anchors, links without any anchor, usual « here » links and so on.

4. Social bookmarking sites

There are many automating tools that can easily bring hundreds of links from social bookmarking sites, this is not unusual at all. However, having the same text describing the link could again pull some triggers and release « Google’s hammer » upon your website.

5. Link diversity

Probably the most important aspect is link diversity. Concentrate your link building efforts on multiple channels, from social media, forums, blog comments, directories to home-page links, review links and so on. This is one of the best strategies to keep your link profile looking natural now and again.

With the launch of this new « search enhancement », SEOs all over the world are trying to guess what is to be changed for their tactics, for search engine optimisation as a whole and for the companies contracting them. But what is Google Instant anyway ?

According to Google, this is a new search feature showing results while you are still typing. Moreover, it has the ability to make smarter prediction on the long tailed keywords, so even if you are looking for a particular name for example, you might find other interesting results that fancy your search query. This is a major change for those searching online information, but how this will affect search engine optimisation companies that make a living from SEO ?
Recent tweets and blog posts show that internet marketers and SEO folks all over the world are worried about this change, some even predicting the death of search engine optimisation and online marketing, as they were until this point. However the tech from Google say although the search engine’s interface has changed, the entire algorithm that decides most relevant results is still the same.

A thing that will surely change is the impressions a site gets on paid results. As you probably know, an impression counts only if the search results are displayed for three seconds or more, therefore there will be lots of folks receiving way more impressions than before, but the problem remains on the CTR : will it lower ? This only time will tell.

Another interesting point is the importance of long tail keywords. Ranking higher for those keywords might only mean good thing while people will type in the search box until they see the results they want. So yes, this should be a major aspect any SEO should keep an eye upon.

What is interesting about this new feature is that even the developers at Google do not really know in what manner it will affect the advertisers going with paid results while “It’s possible that this feature may increase or decrease your overall impression levels.” So up or down ? No one knows and how could regular guys know this while even Google has no perfect picture about it ?